A guided tour of Mesa's development along the light rail corridor.
The guided bus tour (seen in the opening image to the left) focused on the current and prospective developments taking place as the light rail runs through historic downtown Mesa with three stops on Main Street. Valley Metro Light Rail service extended into the Central Business District beyond Sycamore Station, opening in August 2015 with three station platforms: Country Club/Main, Center Street/Main and Mesa Drive/Main. The eastward extension to Gilbert Road is in-the-works.
Nonetheless it was unusual and welcome to see some "out-of-town investors", the City of Mesa, the downtown community activist group RAILMesa, and Local First Arizona partnering up with both commercial and residential real estate brokers along for the ride.
The simple take-away might have been evident in this cartoon to the left
Readers can see a post about the charrette on this blog by hitting the following link >
Shown in the image to the right; unless there's some reason... it could be toxic in some way.
"Along and around Main Street, after decades of mostly-dormancy, Mesa has begun to be awakened. Starting with the singular multicultural experience of Mekong Plaza and the new market-rate townhome development of Main Street Station, the light rail line has welcomed and enhanced affordable housing and mixed-use projects, dynamic new retail, restaurants, and breweries, and unique pop-up and adaptive re-use projects.
> Mesa ArtSpace Lofts now under construction at 155 S Hilbert Street.
It finally got off the ground after three years in "the development process" to use a euphemism.
> El Rancho Del Sol recently celebrating a Grand Opening for the second attainable and affordable workforce housing for families done by Community Development Partners.
[there's a post about this on this blog].
Everyone boarded a bus after getting a presentation inside 29 W Main Street [29-35 W Main St has been vacant for years) where W. Tim Sprague (looking like an orchestra conductor playing to the choir, accidentally captured in the image to the left) presented a big proposal for development on top of a parking lot: a way-out-proportion and way out-of-scale 15-story hotel and 75 "above-market rate" apartments in pretty pictures using architectural renderings where the architects showed The Sun setting in the East. Anyone knows the sun really sets in The West if that's any hint of the accuracy of these Pie-In-The=Sky plans promoted by the developer that's now getting attention for "the next wave of investment for this vital, historic corridor". 
If historical values are any standard as well as authenticity our shared vision of the Central Business District where light rail now runs through it on Main Street is compromised of two-story and three-story buildings fronting on Main Street, some of which will undergo a make-over in a Façade Improvement Project back to their original storefronts. The 3-D image to the right, done by the City of Mesa some years ago shows maximum height six-story building that would keep the balance between the old and the new and be in-proportion and in-scale to what was our authentic commercial Central Business District before getting re-invented as an "Arts-and-Entertainment District" starting in 2005 with the $100-Million Dollar Mesa Arts Center that's yet to spawn economic development here.
The Worsley/MACDev LLC 15-story building proposed to-be-built on top of the Drew Street Parking Lot [seen center left behind charter school Heritage Academy] simply does not fit in proportion to or in-scale with the historic district at all, whereas maximum six- or seven stories in height would be in balance. . . Readers of this blog might also take notice of all the parking lots and parking spaces downtown and scarcity of green open space. Shopping has shifted to the suburbs and suburban malls, creating "A Donut Hole" since the 1980's in the historic downtown central business district. 
This six-story parking garage on MacDonald Street was in the past nixed due to its close proximity to the historic 2-story Alhambra Hotel located just south and to the right behind The BofA building in the bottom parking lot, in the adaptive re-use of an existing property to a student resident hall. The relative proportion of a six-story to a 2-story building is shown in the 3-D image below for scale.
As you can see - even at six stories high - it would have dwarfed the two-story historic property adjacent to it. The other yellow form blocks illustrate some acceptable heights for that city block between Main and First Avenue. On the south side of First Avenue, Mesa Housing Associates built the first new construction downtown in over 30 years: the 5-story 80-unit RED 2014 Award-Winning Encore On First for active independent over-65 residents. Last year another 40 affordable units for persons 55+ was quickly filled. Both buildings have long waiting lists. Charles Huellmantel and Todd Marshall, investors in Mesa Housing Associates, has recently started construction on a 24-unit live-in/work spaces at market-rate rents on the SEC of First Avenue & MacDonald Street. 
Here to the left is the out-of-proportion figment "pretty picture" of MACDev's team of architects for the 15-story, 75 above-market rate apartments and a hotel atop a parking lot on Drew Street behind the 2-story historic Drew Building --- it's a deception that is no way in-scale or in proportion to what a 15-story building would look like plopped down on a parking lot. In the dark on the north side is the 2-story charter school Heritage Academy enrolling over 700 students where there's already a lot of traffic from parents dropping-off/picking up their kids twice a day
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Back to the bus tour: Mekong Plaza
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